Sorry Please Thank You

by Charles Yu

  “Stop that,” Murray screams.

  “Oh fine,” Rick says.

  “How did you get up here?” Murray says between gulps of air.

  “You thought it would be that easy to get rid of me?”

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  “Don’t you see? You can’t escape your arc.”

  “My life isn’t an arc,” Murray says. “I’ve figured it out.”

  “That so? Tell me.”

  “I’m not fighting it anymore,” Murray says.

  “Go on,” Rick says, with a smile. “I’m listening.” He hands Murray a handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

  Murray takes it and dries off, wiping his face and neck. “I made a break for it during the commercial,” Murray says, after catching his breath.

  “Yup.”

  “I heard the music in the elevator, so I took the stairs.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “By resisting your story, I was actually creating it for you.”

  Rick looks a little surprised. “Pretty good,” he says. “Really good, actually. Hardly anyone ever figures that out. But let me ask you a question: what are you going to do now?”

  “I’ve still got seven days to change my mind.”

  “This is true,” Rick says. “But let me show you something.”

  Rick pulls a small ring box out of his pocket and opens it to reveal a small toggle switch.

  “What is that?” Murray says.

  “The on-off switch.”

  “To what?”

  “Why don’t you flip it and find out?”

  As soon as Murray hits the switch, he is deafened by a horrible grinding sound. From out of nowhere Rick produces two sets of earphones. He hands one to Murray and puts the other pair on himself.

  “Ah, that’s better,” says Rick. “Can you hear me?”

  Murray nods, unsure of how he feels with Rick once again talking right into his head, but then he sees where the grinding is coming from.

  “I’ll give you a moment,” Rick says, as he watches Murray take in what he’s looking at, which is the same town he was just running through, the Town, only now it’s not empty, but filled with workers in orange jumpsuits. From behind false walls and through false doors, men appear in twos and threes, wearing blue jackets that say “CONTINUITY” on the back, armed with pressurized canisters and fine brushes.

  “That stuff is called RealLife™,” Rick says. “Aerosolized Themed Ambience.”

  Rick and Murray watch as the men descend upon threadbare corners of the room, holes in the scene where the wire frame is showing through, or the substrate, or whatever was underneath, expertly applying coats and touch-ups to blank patches of reality, surgical and precise with their movements, smoothing over, restoring, stitching the illusion back together, and then, just as quickly as they appeared, the Continuity maintenance workers disappear.

  “Where are we?” Murray says.

  “Backstage,” Rick says.

  The next wave of workers appears, in purple jumpsuits, with white lettering on the back that reads “DISCONTINUITY,” and Murray watches as they appear to undo some of the work that was just done by their predecessors in Continuity, selectively erasing certain bits of the landscape, scuffing a corner here, rubbing away a bit of reality there. Rick explains to Murray that these guys are actually from a completely different department than Continuity.

  “It’s part of Accounts Receivable,” Rick says.

  If a customer doesn’t keep current on payments of the Continuity Maintenance Fee for The Brad™ or The Jake™ or whatever other product they may have chosen, then corporate calls in the continuity disruption team to initiate the Experience Degradation Ladder.

  “Like repo men,” Murray says. “For the life I bought.”

  “Now you’re catching on,” Rick says. “Look at all that. It’s a beautiful thing.” Murray tries to see what Rick is talking about, but all he sees is a kind of factory. A manufacturing process for a way of life. Taking anything, experience, a piece of experiential stuff, a particle of particularity, a sound, a day, a song, a bunch of stuff that happens to people, a thing that makes you laugh, a visual, a feeling, whatever. A mess. A blob. A chunk. A messy, blobby, chunky glob of stuff. Unformed, raw noncontent that gets engineered, honed, and refined until some magical point where it has been processed to sufficient smoothness and can be extruded from the machine: content. A chunk of content, homogeneous and perfect for slicing up into Content Units. All of this for the customer-citizens, who demand it, or not even demand it but come to expect it, or not even expect it, as that would require awareness of any alternative to the substitute, an understanding that this was not always so, that, once upon a time, there was the real thing. They don’t demand it or expect it. They assume it. The product is not a product, it’s built into the very notion of who they are. Content Units everywhere, all of it coming from the same source: jingles, news, ads. Ads, ads, ads. Ads running on every possible screen. Screens at the grocery store, in the coffee line, on the food truck, in your car, on top of taxis, on the sides of buses, in the air, on the street signs, in your office, in the lobby, in the elevator, in your pocket, in your home. Content pipelines productive as ever, churning and chugging, pumping out the content day and night, conceptual smokestacks billowing out content-manufacturing waste product emissions, marginal unit cost of content dropping every day, content just piling up, containers full, warehouses full, cargo ships full, the channels stuffed to bursting with content. So much content that they needed to make new markets just to find a place to put all of it, had to create the Town, and after that, another Town, and beyond that, who knew? What were the limits for American Entertainments, Inc., and its managed-narrative experiential lifestyle products? How big could the Content Factory get?

  “You brought me up here to see this?” Murray says.

  “No,” Rick says, “I brought you up here to see that.”

  Murray looks down to see his son getting out of his car.

  “He’s here to see you,” Rick says. “He heard you’re … ”

  “Let me guess,” Murray says. “Cancer.”

  “The doctors say you’ve got six months. But with modern medicine, who knows? You might live happily ever after. Or at least, happily enough.”

  “Your doctors? In here? TV doctors?”

  “They’re the best in the world. They also have very complicated love lives.”

  “I’m not even sick,” Murray says.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Is that, are you, is that some kind of threat?”

  “No, no no, noooo. Murray, come on. I’m not a bad guy. I’m not your antagonist. I’m just here to give you choices.”

  Murray looks down again and sees his son, someone or something that looks exactly like his son. Except that something seems off.

  “Wait a minute,” Murray says. “Is that even my real son?”

  “Depends on how you define real,” Rick says. “Are you sure you’re still the real Murray?”

  Murray doesn’t even know what that means, but he is tired of this sales guy messing with his head and it seems to Murray that the absolute right thing to do, or perhaps absolute wrong thing to do, or perhaps the absolute right thing to do because it is the absolute wrong thing to do, or just in terms of what will feel good, would be to punch Rick or “Rick” or whatever right in that smug mouth of his, so Murray plants a foot, puts his weight into it as best he knows how, and pops Rick right in that very real mouth of his, flesh and bone on flesh and teeth and that, Murray is sure, is something solid and visceral and real, and Rick goes down.

  “Wow,” Rick says, still lying on the ground, hand covering his mouth, blood running onto his gums and fingers.

  “Sorry,” Murray says, shocked by what he’s done. “I guess I watch too much TV.”

  “No no no,” Rick says. “Happens to me all the time. It’s a good way to end your story. Something tangible, decisive, action-oriented.”

>   “I was supposed to hit you?” Murray says, coming to see what that means. “I can’t escape my arc.”

  Rick nods, like a proud teacher. “You’re not going to live forever. Everyone has their time, of course, but if you stay in here, it’ll be dramatic, and meaningful, and all of that good stuff,” Rick says, pointing down at Murray’s son or “son” or whatever. “And as you can see, you won’t be alone. This is what it comes down to, Murray. If you stay in here, you get closure. If you leave, well, I don’t know what happens to you out there.”

  What am I going to do now? Murray thinks, now realizing that he really is having his epiphany: he is free. Completely free. This is his big Change of Life scene. All his life he’s been waiting. But even now as it is happening, as he tries to hold on to it, it is slipping from him, a shell, just the diaphanous skin of an epiphany, which, with the softest whisper, slips off and floats into the air, the form of the experience, without the substance, the husk of a moment. It feels false. A false resolution. Closure. This is what Rick is offering: a sound-tracked life. Life as a story. A story as a product. Is this really the best he can hope for? Is this all there is?

  Shut up, Murray thinks to himself. Just shut the hell up and stop narrating to yourself. Shut up shut up shut up shut up. Shut up.

  And then it’s quiet. The factory is gone. Rick is gone. The music is gone. Even Murray’s own internal monologue is gone. Behind Murray is his backstory, his life. In front of him is who knows what. But how does he just go on now, having seen what he’s seen? The guts of it. The gears. The machinery of production of his reality. His existence as a customer. As a paying customer in a managed lifestyle experience. This is what it is, what it has been for some time now. The only difference is that now he knows it. Murray has chosen The Brad™ but it’s not enough, or it’s too much, or neither or both. His life is not a dramedy. There is no arc. No episodes, no tuning in next week, no sound track, no ending, happy or sad. He may or may not have cancer. He may or may not have anyone who cares. He has a son in the world, somewhere, who might or might not think of Murray every day. Not much else. Not enough for a story, Murray thinks, here at the edge of his own story, but it will have to do, somehow it’s going to have to be enough, and somehow it is. It’s enough.

  All of the Above

  Sorry Please Thank You

  You’re reading this, so it’s too late. For me, I mean. I’m gone. That’s redundant, isn’t it? What the hell am I doing—only so much space on this napkin and I’m using it up on rhetorical questions? What a metaphor for life—a finite space, impossibly small. No way to fit a whole lifetime in there. But we sure do try. Oh God, I am annoying. I even annoy myself. I’m out of control with this kind of stuff, I know. This is why you never really loved me. Got one bullet in the chamber, barrel jammed in waistband, metal cold against my skin. One bullet, one napkin. Napkin that my last drink was sitting on. Jameson, rocks. Running out of space, so I’ll start to get to the point:

  You said I’d get over it.

  Should have made you a bet, because, hey, guess what, got a loaded gun in my underwear so it turns out I was right. Not that I can complain. Had some good years. My life, nutshell: 0–8 yrs. happy, no reason; 9–19 happy, wrong reasons; 20–33 unhappy for all the right reasons; 34 to present moment, unhappy, looking for a reason. Sorry, man. I get that a lot. I’m sorry for your loss, people say to one another. What does that mean? I wish it weren’t so. I can imagine a world in which it had not happened. But that’s not what sorry means. Sorry means: That happened to you. That happened to you and it may or may not have been inevitable, but it happened and there are some things that happen that we can only look at and say, sorry. Circular. Sorry for your loss means I am sorry that there is loss, or to put it another way, there is loss. The sorry cancels itself out, and it might only mean this: that happened to you, and I can see that it hurt, and I am going to say this word, sorry, that corresponds to something, a vector, a medium of propagation and/or force-carrying particle that allows transmission or communication of sorrow, or the related but not identical state of sorryness, a mysterious action-at-a-distance between humans that allows one human, separated in space and time from another human, to impart upon the other an influence, an effect. The state of being sorry.

  What else can I say? Wish I’d treated people better. Sorry, please, thank you, you’re welcome. All human interaction pretty much covered by those four ideas. You’re not real, of course. You’re the woman I wish I’d met. If I’d met you, I wouldn’t be here now, writing on this napkin. You’re the woman who was supposed to pull me out of this, help me get over the one I did lose. So, yeah, a little angry. How does a perfectly average-looking guy like me end up so unfathomably lonely by the age of forty-one? It’s the day after Christmas. Got one present this year, from my uncle Jim. The widower. A card and a ten-dollar bill. Fixed income, best he can do. He’s in assisted living, room smells like pee. Stares out the window all day. Every year, same gift. I’m a grown man now, but I’m his only nephew and he’s my only family. I’m leaving it on the bar as a tip. The card, I’m keeping. Sorry, get well, congratulations. Happy belated. Miss you. Just because. The fundamentals, the basics, all right there, in your drugstore, the greeting card rack. If you’d only said it, if you’d only had one more chance to say it. If someone had said to me. Any of it. I hope you read this, whoever you are, and imagine that there is a hypothetical person out there who needs your love, has been waiting silently, patiently for it all his life, is flawed and downright ugly at times and yet would have just eaten up any tiny bit of attention you had been willing to give, had you ever stopped your own happy life to notice. And then imagine that this hypothetical person is real, because he probably is. Guess that’s all. Ha. Here I was worrying about space, and now I’ve run out of things to say. Wish I knew a joke to insert HERE. The card says For My Nephew in cursive. No joke inside. That cursive just breaks my heart. Wish I’d met you. Wish I wasn’t your hypothetical. But you’re reading this, which means a few minutes ago, I went into that bathroom and pulled the trigger. You probably heard it. Sorry. You’re welcome. Thank you. And please. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.

  Acknowledgments

  THANK YOU, and also +2d6 coins (redeemable for a whole chicken):

  Timothy O’Connell

  Josefine Kals

  Kate Runde

  Alexander Houstoun

  Russell Perrault